Sightings: Selections from the 2023 Cosmic Rays Film Festival

media release: Mills Folly Microcinema presents Sightings: Selections from the 2023 Cosmic Rays Film Festival on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 at 7:00pm. Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more). Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

The Cosmic Rays Film Festival is an annual celebration of short films in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that expands our idea of what film is and what it can be. Each year, the festival selects work from teh previous year's festival to tour at a variety of museums, universities, micro-cinemas, and other screening venues.

Sightings is a program of short films that probe the limits of representation. These films cut across the generic boundaries of documentary and fiction, the social boundaries of the personal and the political, as well as the material boundaries of cinema itself. Running time: 75 minutes.

FILMS:

Prearranged Signal | Alina Taalman | 2022 | 4:32

In the dream of a stranger.

Lockdown Dreamscape | Nicolas Gebbe | 2022 | 6:48

When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.

Lesser Choices | Courtney Stephens | 2022 | 8:14

The bleached palette and home-movie aesthetics of Super 8 footage provide the image track for this testimonial about an illegal abortion in Mexico City in the 1960s, delivered in voiceover by the filmmaker’s mother. In its account of this intimate and disorienting memory, Lesser Choices summons a time of profound uncertainty—a moment from an era without rights—and offers a warning to the present.

Because the Sky is Blue | Wenhua Shi | 2022 | 4:01

A short tribute to my hometown Wuhan, China. All source footage is from my childhood friends’ social media 15-second video feed. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of contemporary social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity.

Hors Titre | Wiame Haddad | 2022 | 4:22

One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.

Sine Die | Camila Moreiras | 2021 | 14:47 minutes

Amid desert landscapes and chain-link fences, plutonium lay scattered and buried in the town of Palomares, Spain. A voiceover narration describes an undisclosed medical condition, and land and body converge in the uncomfortable difference between recovery and survival. Telling two divergent stories in parallel, Sine die is based on real events that correspond to physical contamination, whether that be the earth or the body – the director’s – that together invoke a condition of the chronically present.

NE Corridor | Joshua Solondz | 2022 | 6:35

Sliced up fragments zipping and framing as the print struggles to make it through the frame. A woman stands ups and turns, a sculpture appears, a lawnmower mows, shredding and falling apart.

Phase II | Kelly Sears | 2022 | 6:30

In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.

For Phase II, the filmmaker walked around areas of rapid development in her city and took thousands of photographs. This animated, speculative fiction/non-fiction archive maps out more aggressive eviction and deployment tactics to come.

Blue Room | Merete Mueller, 2022 | 11:54

In two prisons in the Pacific Northwest, incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch nature videos on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and the wilderness.

Sightings | Pere Ginard, 2023 | 5:57

An underwater walker advances heavily towards the unknown. What he sees, what he finds, makes up this inventory made of melancholy, obsessions and fears.

ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.